The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure

The grid promises to fundamentally change the way we think about and use computing. This infrastructure will connect multiple regional and national computational grids, creating a universal source of pervasive and dependable computing power that supports dramatically new classes of applications. The Grid provides a clear vision of what computational grids are, why we need them, who will use them, and how they will be programmed.

Inside The Grid
* Written by over 30 distinguished experts in high-performance computing and networking, including Francine Berman, Tom DeFanti, Jack Dongarra, Dennis Gannon, Roch Guerin, Ken Kennedy, Miron Livny, Paul Messina, Reagan Moore, Clifford Neuman, Larry Peterson, Jon Postel, and Daniel Reed.

* Edited by the winners of the prestigious 1998 Global Information Infrastructure Next Generation Award-an awards program characterized by U.S. Vice President Al Gore as "confirm[ing] our brightest hopes: that the positive uses of high technology will truly open up new opportunities for all Americans and improve our quality of life."

* Introduced by Larry Smarr, director of National Center for Supercomputing Applications and director of the National Computational Science Alliance, with a chapter that puts grids in context.

Ian Foster is Senior Scientist in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, where he also leads the Distributed Systems Laboratory, and Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. His research concerns techniques, tools, and algorithms for high-performance distributed computing, parallel computing, and computational science. Foster led the research and development of software for the I-WAY wide-area distributed computing experiment, which connected supercomputers, databases, and other high-end resources at 17 sites across North America (a live experiment at the Supercomputing conference of 1995).

Most recently Carl Kesselman received international recognition for GUSTO, the world's first high-performance computational grid. GUSTO pushes the technological envelope by using high-speed networks and software to provide global access to advanced supercomputers and other devices.